YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Alison

lines on the record: 60
first: 2022-08-30
most recent: 2022-08-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“managing that transition, but like we talked about earlier, Facebook's done this multiple times, right? Like we've been through this big evolution. And so this is another big one, but I think on the other side of it, I think we're going to say, oh, wow, like, of course, we went in, you know, this direction. This is really what people wanted out of social media. Anyway, I'm just pretty optimistic about where we're at.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll say kind of one last thing on this. It's a really exciting time for Facebook. And the way that I kind of think about where we are is we definitely have one foot in our kind of legacy and history, which is, I think, what you see in the fees launch that we did today. But we also have a big foot in kind of the future of what the next...”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ever been created? Well, guess what? That AI is being used to help us with integrity issues in different languages and across the world where we can take kind of an AI that might have been trained in one set of languages and actually apply it to another set of languages because of all the investments that we've made in AI. And I think we're doing quite a lot both through the technology that we're creating and the policies and the kind of external relationships that we're building to be able to tackle this on a global scale. And I do hope that that is coming through. And I think that that is definitely where we're kind of thinking internally.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Facebook and Meta serves a global community. And I think that we look at our programs to make sure that no matter who's using the product and from where, that we apply those safety measures and those integrity measures. In different regions, it requires different expertise. It requires some different things to do. But I think you can look at, you know, I mean, we released a human rights report, I think, in the last week or so. And I don't know any other tech company that's releasing a human rights report, but I think like what you're seeing is us investing here and us making progress here and us trying to tell the world about what we're doing about it. And I view things like that as, no, we really do think about this globally. And I just think a lot of the advancements that we're making in AI are going to help us there. We talked about some work that our FAIR team had done, which can basically take AI. And it's one of the most sophisticated AI translation systems that's...”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Accountable to that, so I think you have to be really careful about how it's crafted because the downside of kind of a very strict regulation that's like, make no mistakes ever is going to be, well, then, yeah, maybe companies aren't going to provide this and then maybe that's actually a big disservice to the world. And then maybe companies in other countries or other jurisdictions are going to grow. And, you know, this is going to be available to other folks. So these are all of the types of conversations we're having of just like, hey, we have to really look at kind of the consequences intended and unintended of recommendations. We also have to look at the consequences unintended and intended of regulation and strike really the right balance here.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Appears tomorrow. AI is not going away. Recommendations aren't going away. Large scale kind of networks aren't going away. So my main thing is just like, okay, how do we have a dialogue where Facebook and Meta have a seat at the table and are in a leadership position, but that we are really looking more broadly on what is the industry kind of need to do here? And I think like getting kind of the legislation and the regulation right is going to be really important, right? Like if it's overly punitive, if it's like, hey, if you, if any bad recommendation comes through, we're going to find you some exorbitant amount of money. Well, you know what? In any kind of process, people make mistakes. You know, people make mistakes when they manufacture a car on an assembly line or whatever. Again, that's why you have these kind of continuous quality and enforcement things that we have, like integrity and like the transparency report, because we're constantly trying to get better and hold ourselves.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It doesn't scare me, but I recognize the responsibility that we have, and that is weighty, if you know what I mean. The reason I'm okay with it with recommendations is because of how much we've built up in this space. We've talked about spending $40 billion over several years, just how many people we have working on this. If there's any company that I think has really risen to the challenge of trying to do this at scale, I do think it's meta. And so I do think we're well positioned to do this for recommendations. It's something that my team, you know, as I look at the product features for the discovery engine, our integrity teams are in there, our roadmaps are aligned. It's something that we're looking at very much up front. But I also think it's important to have that broader conversation. Like I said, we're not the only people in the recommendation space at all. If Facebook disappears tomorrow, if Meta disappears.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it could. I think the oversight board is an interesting kind of example of us trying something like this. I think the other thing that we often do, we have a lot of our policy folks that work with kind of groups from other tech companies on, okay, how do we evolve things like our approach to transparency, how do we evolve the ability to, so I think there's I think there's a bunch of work just in terms of the industry getting together and kind of figuring out how do we collectively do this. And then, of course, I think there's kind of a legislative angle, again, which Facebook has historically, you know, shared that, hey, we are supportive of regulation in this space, but I think it needs to be well thought out regulation. And we've been very open to having that dialogue. So I don't think it's like one thing that you can do. I think it's a collective set of things. And I think what you've seen meta do is start to really”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exist tomorrow. Well, you're still going to have a video go live on Twitch that's then pulled down and put onto YouTube, that's then turned into short form video clips on TikTok that are then reposted on Twitter. So that whole ecosystem is shaped by a bunch of different companies. Facebook is one and we're an important one and so we recognize that we have a big responsibility. But if you're just looking at Facebook or you're just looking at like specifically how does Facebook do this particular thing in their algorithm, it's missing the bigger picture, which is like, how is each company approaching this problem? How is each company enforcing on this problem? And who's auditing and providing some sense of whether or not this is even a legitimate way of attacking the problem? That's the conversation that I think we need to be having. And I think Facebook's been doing a good job in meta more broadly, kind of leading there.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a couple of things here. I think what we need to evaluate, Facebook as well as all these other companies on is how well do they do at kind of continuous enforcement of their community standards. So what does that mean? First, you need to publish your community standards and say what's allowed and what's not, and then have a process to modify it. So we've been obviously trying things like the oversight board to have an external body give us feedback on how well our community standards. So I think you need to have kind of a very clear what are the rules here. Then you need to have accountability of like, how are you enforcing the rules? So we have our transparency report. We talk about how much content we're taking down. It's being externally audited in terms of its methodology, in terms of its results. So again, we're not trying to have a lot of other eyes take a look at this. The reason I say, again, it needs to widen from just Facebook is like, let's say Facebook didn't”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Continue sharing how we're doing, and you even mention things like the WVCR, right? We're going to continue to publish that. And we just put that out there. And yeah, some of the things on there, I'm like, oh gosh, okay, I wish that's something where we need to figure out how do we do better on that. And, you know, I think that it's really important, though, that we're always putting out the work on how we're approaching this.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of guidelines. It's our recommendations guidelines. They are a distinct set of kind of policies and guidelines that govern what we show in recommendations. And that is an even higher bar than our community standards because this is content that Facebook and Meta is recommending. And so we are going to be keeping a very high bar in terms of those recommendations guidelines. And I actually hope that all of the other companies that are doing recommendations publish their guidelines, you know, publish the type of transparency reports that we do because I do think that as more and more kind of these social services get into recommendations, it's really going to be important to have this kind of collective understanding of how are these companies making this decision, how are they enforcing on these things. And I think that we have this kind of infrastructure with our policies, with our enforcement, with the reports that we put out to connect.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Especially with the pandemic, everything's just so heavy. I actually think one of the reasons why kind of short form video took off is like it's entertaining, it's fun, it's uplifting. It's just a different vibe than what people were seeing with Doom scrolling or whatever it was. A lot of what we think about in terms of what content do we want to reward is just like, what content do people want to see on Facebook right now? In terms of how do we prevent potentially bad content from coming into recommendations, we have two sets of, I would say guidelines. One is our community standards. This is like this content is not allowed on Facebook, right? So if something violates our community standards, doesn't matter if you're connected to it or not, it's out of, you know, we don't put it into your feed. We don't put it into recommendations. It's like this is just violating our rules. We have another”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great question. So, yeah, just to clarify, too, we still are not recommending political content in groups. That wasn't a temporary thing. That was a permanent thing that we decided to do. But in terms of recommendations overall, again, the first thing that we really look for is like, what are the types of things that people want? And I'll tell you right now, like, I'm not getting a lot of research that says that young adults want more political content on Facebook. I'm not seeing a ton of research that says anybody wants a lot more political content on Facebook. And frankly, that's why we've been kind of looking at kind of reexamining like, where are we kind of showing political content? And you're seeing it really not show up in a lot of our recommendations channels. It's actually because just that's not what people really want to see. And I actually think we kind of learned this in the pandemic too. Like people are really fatigued by a lot of the political discussions and things like that. And I think...”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like somebody reacts to a reel, so they're showing somebody else's content, but they're adding commentary or like something interested on top of it. And then there's other things that are just like low originality. Like somebody took somebody else's video and just posted it through their account. And what we're really trying to do is look at, all right, how do we reward more of the folks that are creating original content or maybe the limited original content they're adding something new to the conversation versus folks that are maybe just kind of recycling something or reposting something and kind of doing this at scale is something that we're working through how to do for reels and some of our other content types but that's a piece that i'm pretty excited about the team talks about a lot we do want facebook to be attractive to creators and we do want creators who put effort into creating original content to feel like they're getting rewarded both through distribution as well as through a bunch of the kind of monetization”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we ask people, do they want to see more, see less of it? Do they say that they want to see less of it, right? So you kind of have to say, hey, whatever the signal you got from the fact that a lot of people watched a lot of this video, you need to discount that because there's these other kind of more qualitative signals that say people did not actually like this experience of watching this video. So we're doing a lot of work around things of that nature. The other thing that we're doing too is, and we talked about this with video in the past, I speak about these things just because reels and video are kind of big top of mind for the recommendation systems right now. But we are looking at kind of different aspects of originality. So, okay, hey, was this content that was produced? Was the person that kind of created it or posted it the person that created it? Or was it kind of like there might be types of content where what we would call it's like limited originality?”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a couple of things that we're looking at here. One is what I kind of mentioned before, which is incorporating more signals that reflect literally people telling us kind of what they want or not. So Seymour, see less, right? Like one of the things that we've kind of seen, we've been looking at this issue of like watchbait recently, right? So watchbait is where somebody's trying to get you to watch a video to its completion because again, if you produce a video of a certain length, then you can kind of monetize it. So there's all these incentives to get you to watch the video. But sometimes the video just, it's like terrible. You like watch till the end. You're like, this video, it sucked, right? Like it's a really bad experience. And so one of the things that we kind of are looking at is like, okay, what are the types of things that help us understand that this wasn't bad video? Were there angry reactions on this video?”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do think we went through that period a little bit before that period as we were building these teams where we were not always thinking about this very adversarial nature of things. And I think actually building out the integrity muscle created a set of people in a culture that were able to say, you know, actually, this is the way a bad actor is going to go in and abuse this system. This is the way that this thing is going to get compromised when we were going through that period we were still really building out in integrity. But again, I think the fact that we were spending so much to build up those teams, I mean, one of the things I talked through is the history of different kind of phases of Facebook. I remember the history of the kind of expansion of different teams because as when I was leading engineering, I remember having to figure out hiring and stuff. And that period, we were expanding those integrity teams so rapidly because we knew, hey, we've got to.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I have a little bit of trouble with hey, could you not foresee this? Because we were investing so much and we had these teams that were working and researching the problem. That was why a lot of that research was being produced. It was being produced as this evolved. And like I said, in terms of foreseeing it, I actually looked at what were some of the top integrity issues before MSI and they were just very different. And so as we kind of change things, we kind of know that like, okay, some things are going to happen here, some things we're going to be able to predict, some things we're not going to be able to predict. But that's why, again, we have this very active integrity team looking at how this unfolds on a very regular basis. And I think we've hired some of the best in the business to really be able to analyze and think through. I also think one thing I will say on this, though, is that”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Using our system. And so, you know, I'm proud of the work that the integrity teams do. I'm proud of the research. And I spend a bunch of time with our integrity teams. They are deeply embedded in our product development process now. And I think that we've gotten quite good at this. But yeah, as we went through that period, we saw a lot of different ways that I think people were distorting or kind of abusing what I think were the really frankly good use cases for MSI for things that were not great.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What happened when we introduced MSI with, you know, I think a lot of good research about what people wanted is you saw some of the adversarial behavior come in. You saw some people gaming the system. And the reason we invest so much in integrity and even, I mean, you know, we've shared how much we've invested in it from a human kind of headcount perspective and from a budget perspective, but we know that it's this adversarial problem. So a lot of the research that kind of was ended up being leaked out there was created by our integrity team. Some of it created by people on my team who said, hey, look, this is how this is being abused. This is now what we need to do to fix this. And that's why MSI and our implementation of it has changed over and over and over again as we understood A, how are people's feelings about what connects them socially? How are those changing? And then B, how are these bad actors kind of abusing?”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think like any kind of system of incentives, you have folks that find a way to abuse it. It was funny because like one of the integrity problems that we were looking at before MSI was things like what we would call watch feet or clickbait, right? Like when you kind of optimize a system for time spent, you get a different type of a problem. You get people kind of trying to trick you into watching something that's not that valuable or clicking on something that's not that valuable. NSI really, again, came from the spirit of People want on Facebook to feel like they can interact with one another. Comments were a very good proxy for that. But yeah, I mean, what we ended up seeing too was some people left gnarly comments. Some people abused that system. And when we talk about integrity, we actually know that it's an adversarial problem, which means it's never solved. It just unfortunately changes. And so”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Formats in the past, we've kind of brought on new entity types, groups, creators, pages in the past. We're pretty good at AI, so we're pretty good at social. And I think how well we bring all these things together over the next year or two is going to determine how successful we are and how much people want to continue using Facebook. But I'm pretty optimistic right now.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, Tom, are you chasing TikTok? And you see that in the press, but I kind of say, hey, look from where I sit. I see TikTok chasing Facebook, you know. I said, I started my career on the growth team, and I see TikTok asking me to find my friends. I was scrolling through TikTok, and there was a unit that said people you may know. I managed the people you may know team at Facebook as my first management job. We literally created a system called People You May Know, and then I'm literally seeing people you may know on TikTok. And I'm like, I know what's going on here. This is what I worked on when I was working on growing the Facebook social network, right? And so I think all of these companies are starting to try to figure out what is going to be the right blend of the kind of AI algorithmic recommendations and the social interactions and recommendations. And this is why I feel like Facebook's actually well positioned to succeed here. We've integrated.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So obviously the format stuff that's happening now is around video and short form video. The people that are kind of getting wired into the experience, you know, it was groups a few years ago, which has gone really well. Now it's creators that are getting kind of more wired into this experience. And so I see our next piece as an expansion. And then the technology piece that I think is new and exciting, similar to Web to mobile, is the power of AI. And like, it's just so amazing the innovation that's happening in the AI space and what some of these new kind of AI architectures and models are really capable of doing. And so, you know, I see kind of this, great, like, who's going to be able to leverage the power of AI recommendations and marry them with the power of social traditional kind of connected social networks. And you see TikTok trying to do that. A lot of folks say to me.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that was kind of like this proliferation of us really understanding the power of what feed could do. And then I think, you know, probably there's a phase after that where you started to see things shift. You saw the shift to stories. And again, this was similar to I remember the shift to mobile. And, you know, when we were like, okay, cool, let's get on stories. Let's get it out there. People didn't use it for a while. It was sitting at the top of feed. Everyone was like, Facebook stories is a ghost town. It's going to fail. And then, you know, like a year and a half later, like people were just like, oh, cool, this is the way I want to share now. And it kind of took off. And so those were a couple of the big transformations that I saw. And I think the next one, again, is really like, it's this story of format innovation and kind of wiring in new ways for people to express themselves.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right hand column add so in hindsight we all kind of like laugh about it but it was this huge mental breakthrough to be like oh we're gonna show ads in feed it was like we can't possibly do that right and like so watching the organization go through that was was really interesting i think the next phase of things one of the things that i'm i'm proud of facebook for is that we've been able to integrate different formats i think you see tick tock and you see youtube trying to do this but facebook was able to integrate video it was able to integrate other entity types too like groups where you could form a community and so i think that over the next kind of several years you saw feed just kind of grow and being able to integrate these new format types and these new content types and it was just exciting to see how much you could really use feed to kind of keep track of within your friends within your communities following pace”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you were used to designing for the web was big. So I don't know that our core feed changed that much, but it was this gigantic shift that we had to make as a company under a lot of pressure during the IPO and everything that was really kind of memorable to me. And alongside of that was figuring out how to make money on mobile, right? Because like I said, we were so used to making money through the web”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. I joined the company in 2010. I joined as an engineer and I worked on our growth team for the first two years there. So I think I was there. I think our milestone was like 500 million users or something that we hit in my first year. But that era that I really remember was that transition from web to mobile. It was just like, and this was like around the time of our IPO, and I remember tons of headlines, Facebook isn't going to succeed on mobile. Facebook doesn't have a business. Facebook is a web company. It's dead. And so I say this because I'm kind of used to living through the skepticism as Facebook has made kind of these big leaps. And I've always kind of seen this get to the other side. So the shift from web to mobile was a big one. And that was actually big in terms of like the technology lift and the engineering lift to do that was actually huge. And then of course figuring out how to design and have a good mobile product.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of, we have new generations using social media. I want to make sure that Facebook contributes to Meta's overall business. I want to make sure that Facebook feels fast and easy to use and enjoyable. And I want to make sure that Facebook is safe and that we do a good job of protecting your data. And that kind of boils down to.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Making sure that all these interactions load right, feel right, work well is a really important part of the kind of holistic experience. And then I look at trust and safety, right? Like integrity, how are we doing on kind of prevalence and mitigating kind of, you know, the harms and adhering to community standards? And the trust piece is increasingly also about privacy. How well are we doing in terms of our privacy commitments and different things like that? So I look at kind of that bucket of things and there's goals that kind of ladder up to all of those at different levels of the organization. And then of course we look at things like sentiment and like, you know, how much do people prefer Facebook for this over this other service? And so, you know, that gives me like kind of a complete picture of how are we doing. So, you know, I want to make sure that Facebook is growing, that people feel like, hey, this is a valuable thing to me even as.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“of the shape of that. First bucket of goal is just like are people visiting Facebook? Are they choosing to visit Facebook on a monthly basis, on a daily basis? You know, if we have really bad recommendations, people are not going to visit Facebook as often. They'll go to another competitor that's doing recommendations. So I just look at like, hey, are people choosing to visit? That's kind of one bucket. Another bucket we look at is, hey, we're a business. Are we actually kind of growing revenue? Are these things monetizing, you know, monetizing videos different than monetizing feed? So there's a whole lot of work that we need to do to make sure that the business is running as we make these kind of format integrations and innovations. So that's another bucket. A third bucket that I look at is kind of what I'll call it the quality and reliability of the experience. Does Facebook load quickly? I used to be responsible for the performance and reliability of the Facebook app and we really learned that, hey, look.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, MSI, we ended up kind of creating this kind of, I would say, almost like a composite metric. But the heart of it was really looking at are we increasing kind of the amount of social activity on the site? So friend posting, commenting, things of that nature. Now we still look at all of that. Like there's different teams that look at how many comments are people sharing with one another, how many kind of messages are people sending back and forth. And so, you know, there's a lot of different goals at different levels in the organization that kind of reflect or are meant to reflect the health of what I would call kind of the social ecosystem. What I look at in particular, I look at a kind of like four buckets of goals, I would say. That's the thing. I think the one thing I'd love to get across is there's no one goal. Like I kind of, you know, share this a bunch. There's a lot of different goals. And I'll just give you kind of.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Plainly was the goal for MSI. I know Mark said at the time we expect time spent to decrease if MSI works. What was the goal for MSI? Did it work? And then what is your goal for discovery engine? What are you going the teams towards in terms of a metric, a North Star metric for discovery engine?”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brought up this fact that people are like, oh, do they like recommendations? Do they not? I actually think it's partially because we need to make the quality of them much better, right? This is why you've heard about some of the changes we've made to AI and in my team, we've pulled together some of the best and brightest kind of AI engineers across the company to really focus on recommendations quality, to figure out how to leverage both. Like what do we know about the content? What do we know about the person? What are they telling us they want to see more or less of? So I think these recommendations are going to get better and better and better to the point where they feel just as good, if not even better than some of your connected content and feed. That's our aspiration.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Especially going back to the MSI conversation, you know, we always kind of struggled with the fact that one of the kind of meaningful social interactions that a lot of people have when they see something on Facebook is they might not like it, they might not comment on it, but they go and they talk to a friend about it, right? I'm regularly talking to my wife of like, oh, I saw this thing on Facebook today and we talk about it in Facebook doesn't know that loop happened, right? But now when Facebook shows me something and it says, hey, Tom, do you want to see more or see less of it? I can say, hey, I want to see more of it because, again, I'm not necessarily sharing this Facebook. We're like, hey, this is the type of thing that helps me have a good, like an interesting conversation with my wife. So I think incorporating a lot of those, I don't know, almost like user preference type signals is a really exciting area for me and a lot of our teams. And I think it's going to help make sure that the recommendations we show you are relevant because you”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With this topic or this type of content before have your friends done that you might not be connected to this creator, but have you liked their post before? Have you commented on their stuff? Have you participated in a group that might be similar to the post from a public group that we're recommending? So we look at a lot of characteristics of trying to understand, is this something that you would be interested in right now? We really try to understand the content behind this. One of the things that I'm actually really excited about that our teams have been working on, and you're going to see this more and more kind of throughout the product, but periodically we ask people on a recommendation, hey, do you want to see more of this or do you want to see less of this? And like that's our way of just asking you, hey, just help us, right? Tell us kind of what you're into. And the reason that I'm kind of excited about that.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, when we rank your, you know, your connected feed, you know, we're looking at a lot of what we call signals. We're looking at a lot of different aspects of the content itself and your previous behavior to help us understand, is this something that you would like to see at the top of your feet or not? So we look at your interaction history with the friend, we look at how often have you commented on their post, how often have you sent them a message? How often have you liked things? How often have you shared them? And then we also look at kind of qualities of the content itself. Obviously, there's kind of integrity and community standards things that we look at. But it's just a host of kind of different things to help us understand, is this something that you would want to see right now, kind of at the, you know, towards the top of your feet. It's actually similar to recommendations in some way, right? Like we kind of, you know, we can take a look at like, well, have you kind of interacted?”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can you explain how that worked? Before you were sorting based on who your friends were and the pages you follow, and now how do you decide what someone sees? How do you decide quality in an environment like this?”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In this kind of being able to share with your friends and connect with them, but recognize A is changing for people, and B, some of this kind of more public content because of the medium and because of the formats behind it is becoming much more relatable and personal than I think it was even a few years ago.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Important to note that even though this is what you would call public content or video content, people find that connection with a creator quite meaningful. And I think we all experience this to some degree. I was listening to a podcast with Lex Friedman and Susan Kane, and they were remarking how they feel like they have a relationship with some of the podcasters and musicians without ever even really needing them. So I think we were really starting to see how these kind of creator driven content that really speaks to people, to them feels quite meaningful, even though that might not be like an explicit connection between two friends. So I would say that the way that we're trying to orient the Facebook kind of future of feed is still very much in the spirit of like, how do we show you things and surface things to you that are going to result?”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do so, you're seeing these kind of generational differences in what constitutes a meaningful social interaction. The other thing that we really saw was, wow, folks prefer often to have conversations with friends over Messenger. So the story is the conversation starter, but rather than commenting on a feed post, the interactions and the kind of meaning of that and the relationship building happens in a more private messenger thread, whether it's one-on-one or whether it's a group. And that's why, I mean, you see on Facebook, you see a visual story and you can start a messaging thread on it. But what we really saw is when we put the lens on that next generation, we said, wow, the meaning that they get are those meaningful social interactions. The way they're doing that is changing. And so we really need to adapt our product to it. I think the other thing that we really saw with young adults was how much they value creator content that speaks to them, that speaks to their interests. And I think it's important.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that we continue to do with MSI is it evolved over time. We were constantly trying to figure out, well, what social interactions are meaningful to people and how are they evolving because what we can do is kind of a proxy of what people really want in their relationships. And so now to tie this back to the discovery engine, again, there's kind of a shift when we look at the social interactions that young adults value. They are much more likely to share via stories than they are to feed. They want to kind of share more everyday moments that are depressurized, that might not stick on their timeline, and are visual and expressive. And when you think about a meaningful social media kind of interaction for them, it's much more likely to be posting a story than for me where I kind of, you know, grew up using the fee. That's what I”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, and it was waiting things like, yeah, when we looked at a whole bunch of factors from research about, you know, to the degree, you know, that we could understand this, like what was creating meaningful social interactions. And when we did that, and I remember, you know, Mark kind of said this, I think during the announcement, we ended up kind of cutting back several, I don't remember, it was a big number of like video watch time as we prioritized more of the social interactions.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A, this is not fundamentally what people come to Facebook for. You know, we got a lot of like, hey, where's my friend content? Yeah, these videos are cool. I watch them, but I miss seeing content from my friends. I come to Facebook to kind of interact. And so what we really ended up doing was tilting more towards, no, we're going to prioritize the content that people say helps them create these kind of meaningful social interactions. And so things that lead to conversations, things that help you connect with your friends and things of that nature. So that was really what you saw as us kind of incorporating that.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Optimize for to provide the value that we think corresponds with what people want from it. So prior to MSI in 2017, we were really looking at time spent. A lot of companies were looking at time spent. You know, YouTube, other things. The idea being that if you choose to spend your time with Facebook, we're providing you with a lot of value. And this was, of course, as video was really starting to make its way more prominently onto mobile devices. People were looking at links, a lot of other things. But the downside of kind of optimizing or going on time spent was as the ranking was deciding what to show you, it started to say, well, hey, Tom's more likely to spend time on this video, more time on this video versus this post from his friend. So we'll prioritize that higher in feed. And really what we learned was”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't view it as a departure, but maybe let me talk a little bit about MSI because I was working in the Facebook app when we did that, a little bit about kind of how that came about and maybe how kind of what we're doing is an extension of that. But first off, MSI stands for meaningful social interactions. It's essentially an approach towards ranking content and prioritizing what we show in news feed that prioritizes content that we think is going to bring you closer to the people that you care about, whether it's seeing friend posts or whether it's commenting on things or sharing things. We kind of develop that as a response to what we were previously doing in Facebook more on 2015 and 2016. I guess stepping back, you know, every kind of ranking system has what you would call an objective function. It's the thing that that system is trying to”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And using that to springboard into a conversation about an interest that you share and deepening that. So again, I think that it's taking some time because we've built up this, well feed is connected content mentality. But as people have really seen the ways that this can facilitate social relationships and strengthen them, people are like, oh, okay, I get it. And we're at the beginning of the journey too. There's a lot more kind of work and features that we need to implement into Facebook to make kind of this vision of the discovery engine that I'm talking about a full reality. But that's where we're going over the next year.”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can lead to connection because that's what you discuss, that's what you might share, that's what might start a message thread with another person. But what we're really doing is kind of saying, you know what, recommendations can do that too. And, you know, I found this great creator on Facebook. He has an account over the fire cooking, guy named Derek. barbecues food and like i really like that and i saw that and i'm like oh this is really cool and like i share that with my friend who likes barbecuing and like it started a conversation and it deepened this kind of shared interest that we have and so a lot of what i've been kind of talking to the teams internally about is again this is a way that people ultimately want to connect with other people whether it's with feeling this kind of connection with a creator that they might not physically know but they like emotionally resonate with or whether it's sharing a piece of content with a friend that you find via the discovery engine”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, what we're about is we're about giving people the power to share and express themselves, and we're about connecting kind of the most people that we can to that. That's really the kind of promise of social media. So is it uncomfortable when we go through these things? Is there a lot of discussion internally? Like, are we losing our kind of legacy? And yeah, there's a lot of that, but that's what makes it pretty exciting. And I'll just tell you my kind of take on this and the thing that I kind of tell my team is Facebook at the end of the day, we are going to be deeply rooted in social connection. Like that's the value that we provide. And so we have this kind of, you know, mantra in the theme team now. We call it connection through content. There's this recognition that kind of content, whether it's from your friend network or whether it's from a connected group,”
2022-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT